Opposition to Anachronistic Family Models

By Matthew Milhon

On Friday, November 9th, the German parliament narrowly passed legislation proposed by Chancellor Merkel that created a new child-care subsidy for parents who choose to care for their children at home rather than in a day-care facility. The subsidy, slated to take effect in August 2013, entitles parents ?100 per month for each child between the ages of 15 months and three years that is cared for at home, the payment is scheduled to rise to ?150 per child in 2014.

Opposition to the legislation can be found on all sides of Germany's political spectrum. The estimated costs of the legislation, an initial ?300 million that will rise to ?1.1 billion in 2014, have fiscal conservatives concerned that it is too much of an investment in the current climate of fiscal uncertainty and an undue burden on the German taxpayer. There are even those in the Chancellor's own party who object to such a subsidy, though on entirely different grounds.

Left-leaning critics of the legislation fear that the subsidy will incentivize women to refrain from entering the work force and encourage immigrant families to keep their children out of German day-care centers. The Wall Street Journal reports that progressive critics say "the money would be better spent on expanding child care and enforcing an already existing law that requires German communities to ensure there is a child-care space for every child that needs one, instead of reinforcing anachronistic family role models." This objection is nothing if not consistent with a secular progressivist word-view.

It's all there, spending more money on existing government programs, further increasing the size of the nanny state (pun intended) with the goal of destroying "anachronistic family role models." That is the formula for secular progressives these days; more taxes, less family. Now I hope I am not being to fantastic, but this reminds me a bit of Huxley's "Brave New World," if you control the children and their education, you control society. What is the goal of encouraging parents to send their children to state run day care, then off to public schools, and then into public colleges if it is not, at least implicitly, to form them as the state sees fit? I admit that opposition to a child-care subsidy is not quite the same as 'sleep learning' but one can see where this progressivist world-view aims, at taking rights away from parents and families and giving them to the state. It is a broken culture that fights to keep children out of their homes, away from their parents so that by Ford, Community, Identity, and Stability reign supreme.